If 2016 taught us anything, it was that SSDs are an important new tool in the toolbelt of the hacker community. Several of the major identity theft and intellectual property theft cases from 2016 can trace their roots to a breach of data from an SSD. Sam Donaldson of DZone Security writes that “ in the first six months of 2016, 550 million records were stolen making it 65 percent higher than the statistics from the previous year.” They continue, saying that “hackers recently have been utilizing poor drive disposal to their advantage. Due to the growth inside SSD devices, reformatting SSDs is simply not good enough to prevent a data breach from occurring.”

And it’s not just data destruction, your encryption could actually be putting your data at risk, “because fully homomorphic encryption is not yet readily available to compute arbitrary functions over encrypted data without the decryption key, every time that we manipulate encrypted data, it is decrypted and this is where a cyber attack can easily occur.”

STS Electronic Recycling prides itself on providing it’s customers with the most secure data destruction techniques, including on-site drive shredding. Don’t expose your IT Department to possible liability. Let STS destroy your data properly.

1. https://dzone.com/articles/the-year-of-data-breaches-why-encryption-and-refor

We are halfway through 2017, and every Health IT Professional needs to take stock of the shifting landscape of HIPAA requirements and revisions, as well as the ever present threat of data breaches and theft.

As Erin Ditsche points out in his December 23rd article of the Health IT & CIO Review, reflecting back upon 2016 gives everyone an excellent opportunity to measure the cost of high risk behavior and lackadaisical data management.

With the top 6 HIPAA settlement fines totaling more than $19 Million, and with updates and revisions to HIPAA requirements enshrined into law as recently as December 13th, 2016 (with the 21st Century Cures Act,) we all need to be up to date and clear on the best and most secure methods of data destruction and what constitutes a compliant data destruction service and what does not.

1. http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/6-largest-hipaa-settlement-fines-of-2016.html

In an initiative began February 1st, Japan has begun asking the country’s citizens to donate electronic scrap in order to create the gold, silver and bronze medals for the 2020 Olympic Games. Colin Staub of E-Scrap new reports, “The goal is to collect 88 pounds of gold, 10,800 pounds of silver and 6,500 pounds of bronze,” allowing for the creation of the 5,000 Olympic and Paralympic medals needed. The effort looks to remove an estimated 3,500 tons of electronic waste from the environment.

"There's quite a limit on the resources of our earth, and so recycling these things and giving them a new use will make us all think about the environment," Tokyo 2020 Sports Director Koji Murofushi told a news conference.

The move is also part of an effort to promote sustainability and save costs after the budget for the event ballooned to more than 3 trillion yen ($26.5 billion) at one point, though organizers reduced that sum to $16.8 billion late last year, according to Reuters News.

1. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-tokyo-medals-idUSKBN15G426
2. https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2017/02/09/e-scrap-utilized-2020-olympic-medals/#more-4077

STS Electronic Recycling and Ark-La-Tex Document Shredding partnered again with CBS 19 of Tyler to bring the Shredder and Electronics Recycling Day back to Tyler, Tx.

On April 16, the 3rd annual electronics recycling and document shredding day recorded another successful year of helping local Tyler businesses and individuals with disposing of old electronics and documents.  The event is put on in partnership with CBS 19 to make sure the Tyler area has a safe way to discard of sensitive materials including computers, laptops and documents with personal and business data.

This event helps keep recyclable electronics and paper out of local landfills, essentially turning would be trash in to reclaimable raw materials such as glass, plastics, paper and metals.  

STS Electronic Recycling and Ark-La-Tex Shredding thank CBS 19 and the City of Tyler for helping make east Texas a cleaner safer place.